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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials
AMAT 262.92+0.4%Dec 29 3:59 PM EST
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To: Ian@SI who wrote (31360)7/12/1999 3:22:00 AM
From: BelowTheCrowd  Read Replies (2) of 70976
 
Ian,

I won't speak for my friend Richard, but speaking for myself, I've worked at both INTC and HWP (as well as many others less relevant to the discussion).

Fact is, we have that kind of debate in my current job all the time. How can we make our PCs more reliable? How reliable should they be? What's the tradeoff between reducing failures vs. paying the warranty costs (and non tangible "customer dissatisfaction costs") of just fixing them when they do break.

The answer is that there's no clear answer. Additional development cost and time would certain reduce the warranty costs and minimize bad experiences to our customers. Also increase the cost of our products and cause some customers to skip them entirely.

Worth pointing out another issue with the Honda vs. Capital Equipment argument. Cars have hit the point where the technological change from one year to the next is minimal. Tweak the sheet metal, tweak the engine design, capitalize on decades and tens (or hundreds) of millions of units of experience with the same basic technologies. Hard to do the same thing in an industry where many of the basic technologies, components and tools are obsoleted every three years.

Worth pointing out that other complex, low volume technologies have similar problems to semi equipment. Aircraft and ships exhibit similar levels of complexity, and similar maintenance requirements.

mg
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